#237

If something can stop with you, it is usually wise to let it. In this world almost everything keeps going, gets passed on, ricochets around way longer than a ripple should. The force of one angry act can exert over human generations. Angry words spoken once between two humans can determine the shape of the world for hundreds of years. Trauma and resentment build inside of people and get passed to their children and the children pass it on with interest to their children and it becomes a miasma that hurts and kills, and can catch fire and explode at any time. 

Passing our bad vibes to the people around us can temporarily assuage the feeling of them, though not heal them at their source, and for the price, we have multiplied bad vibes. It's easy, though. The psychic cost of passing on a bad vibe is, for some reason, extremely low. Much harder to hang onto it and let it dissipate, to use yourself as a crucible to at least neutralize the negative energy. To turn it into something positive, such as forgiveness, or humor, is even more blistering. People say it takes fewer muscles to smile than to frown, as though this should rob you of any excuse not to plaster one on your face at all times. In point of fact, a smile may technically be easier for the face to perform, but the actual cost of it is something else entirely; with a single flash of smile, you could power a frown for three days, probably. Yet the smile uplifts while the frown exhausts. Nothing to do with physical muscles.

The strength to smile, the power to let go, the toughness to maintain oneself in pain and sorrow, in the face of injustice and cruelty. Building the muscle mass for these tasks is not a matter of maintaining a workout log which never omits leg day. 

It is in paying a great price. In always choosing the path of most resistance, in taking on the burdens of virtue, in the way of walking through the fire and flowing with the water.

--JL